Chapter 354: Peace, and After (2)

Elene delivered the warning and left at once. Her own kingdom was buried under the work of restoration, yet she had crossed the distance for Ketal’s sake. He thanked her and saw her off before returning to his chair.

Alone, he stared at the thing floating before his eyes.

[Quest# 791]

[Respond to the Quest.]

[Respond to the Quest. Respond to the Quest. Respond to the Quest. Respond to the Quest.]

[Warning: if you do not respond, the world you wish for will collapse.]

It had been a long time since the System window had appeared. As always, the message told him to respond to something, and given the timing, he suspected it involved the Demon Realm. That was all it offered. There was no target, no direction, no destination waiting ahead.

“What is this?” he murmured. He frowned at a format he had never seen. “Am I supposed to find it myself?”

The repetition felt wrong. His gaze drifted back to the final line.

[Warning: if you do not respond, the world you wish for will collapse.]

It was a stark warning. Since the day he stepped outside the White Snowfield, the window had only once paired a Quest with a warning like that. It had been when the Ugly Rat burst into the world.

Back then, the message had said a failure to respond could be dangerous. It had felt like a prediction, something couched in probability. However, this time was different. The phrasing had the weight of a verdict.

Does this mean something worse than the Ugly Rat has come out?

he thought. The thought did not sit easily. He searched it from another angle.

Is there even anything worse than the Rat?

Inside the White Snowfield, the Ugly Rat had been a creature apart. The White Serpent and the White Bear could be called its equals, but neither surpassed it in a way that mattered.

Of course, there were exceptions. The three Primarchs stood above even the Rat, locked in an eternal struggle against one another and none else. The thought that one of them might have stepped beyond that cycle was almost unthinkable.

Then, is it from a different Demon Realm?

Ketal wondered.

The White Snowfield was not the only Demon Realm in this world. Beyond it lived beings such as Nano and the primates of the Deep Sea, creatures born from other Demon Realms. Something might have crawled forth from one of those places.

However, everything remained guesswork. There was not enough information to tie any knot.

“I have no reason to sit still,” Ketal said as he clicked his tongue.

The Quest bore its own warning—if he remained still, the world he longed for would collapse. There was no choice but to move. And if the window refused to offer answers, he would seek out the truth with his own hands.

He went to find Milayna.

“Milayna. I need a favor.”

“What can I do for you?” she asked Ketal.

“Can you gather information on the Demon Realms?”

“The Demon Realms?” she repeated. The request came from nowhere, and still she nodded without complaint. “I will bring what I can at once.”

“Thank you.”

A day later, Milayna returned with packets tied by ribbon and stamped by her house.

“I brought what you asked for. The short version is that there is no serious trouble.”

“No trouble, you say,” Ketal said.

The barriers surrounding the Demon Realms had begun to weaken. Beings like Nano and the deep-sea primates had already slipped free from their domains, and there should have been others following in their wake. Yet no new movements had been reported.

“To be precise, some incidents did occur. There were cases where beings from those regions broke out. But all of them were handled,” Milayna clarified.

“Handled by whom? The Tower Master?” he asked her.

“No.” She shook her head. “The Empire.”

“The Empire?”

“Yes. The Empire suppressed every instance.”

Ketal let out a soft sound. “Wait, come to think of it...”

He had once heard it spoken in passing—that when it came to anything concerning the Demon Realms, the Empire acted with unmatched speed and precision. Now, it seemed that rumor carried a spine of truth.

“These are the movements we traced,” Milayna said, handing over a stack of notes to Ketal.

Ketal skimmed the pages, and the details matched her summary.

There was the Bottomless Pit that sought to pull the world down into it. Creatures from nowhere had begun to climb out, and each bore a power that would have strained a Transcendent. They had spilled into the open and taken ground. The Empire moved at once, sealed the Bottomless Pit with force, and killed the things that had already climbed free.

There was the Silent Forest where all sound died. An Imperial special unit had entered the canopy, captured something that ate sound, and carried it away.

There was the Deep Hole. When poison began to rise and stain the air, Imperial units went down, found the source, and erased it.

Beyond those, the Empire had dealt with several other regions. Ketal exhaled his surprise.

“So much happened,” Ketal murmured.

He had known nothing of it. The window hadn’t so much as flickered open. The Empire had resolved each crisis before the Quest System had even thought to respond.

“From long ago, whenever the Empire received information tied to the Demon Realms, they moved immediately,” Milayna said. “Thanks to that, the continent could focus on Hell without worrying about other threats. I think the Empire remained quiet during the war because they were handling those matters under the surface.”

She was not alone in that belief. The strongest power on the continent had remained absent from every battlefield during the war against Hell, and there had to be a reason. Many had come to think that reason lay with the Demon Realms themselves. They were right about the cause, though what they imagined was far from the truth.

Ketal set his finger on the edge of a page and thought through what remained. If the reports were true, every region except the White Snowfield stood quiet. That made the next step harder.

“In that case,” he asked, “is there any place outside the Demon Realms where something has gone wrong or grown strange?”

“I will look now,” she said.

Milayna recognized the look on his face; something within him had shifted. Without hesitation, she set her entire network into motion, pursuing every lead at once.

Hours later, she returned under the weight of a mountain of paper.

“I brought records on every region.”

“You truly are fast,” Ketal said. “Thank you.”

“I bring them quickly when it is you,” she said with a small smile. “Even so, I found very little that looks like trouble.”

Across the map, cities and shrines alike had already begun their repairs, the world slowly stitching itself back together. Yet amid that quiet restoration, one place stood apart—something about it did not fit.

“There is one anomaly,” she said.

“Where?”

“The Under City. Magna Rain. Do you know of the place?”

“Very well,” Ketal said.

A Hero mage had once hollowed out the earth to create it, carving deep into the crust where sunlight could never reach. Over time, it had become a refuge for outlaws and exiles—a hidden city beneath the world.

All manner of thieves and murderers had gathered within its depths. It would be no exaggeration to say that those who should have met the executioner’s blade filled every street. Ketal had once crossed paths with one of its denizens.

Cassandra

, he thought.

Milayna continued, “As a city of criminals, Magna Rain rarely exchanged with the surface. This time was different.”

When Hell came and tried to burn the world, the lines had changed. Crimes that deserved a rope in peacetime became small offenses in a world that needed every hand. Magna Rain cooperated with the Mortal Realm and helped fight the demons. Even after the war ended, they kept a modest exchange.

However, three days ago, all contact stopped.

“Perhaps it is nothing,” Milayna said. “They are criminals. Now that the war is over, they may have simply cut ties again.”

It was the most reasonable reading. Those below had turned their backs on the Mortal Realm long ago. There was no need to stay friendly now that the fighting had ended.

Ketal narrowed his eyes, the old instinct that had once guided him out of the White Snowfield stirring to life once more. Something was there.

“Can you give me their location?”

“You plan to go,” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“All right. Give me a moment.”

Milayna marked the point on a clean sheet and gave it to him. Ketal said he would be gone for a short time. Serena, who had been lying on a couch doing nothing of importance, sat up in a rush.

“Are you leaving?” she asked Ketal.

“There is something I need to look at.”

“May I come?”

“No,” he said. “Stay here.”

“O-okay,” she said.

“It could be dangerous,” he explained.

Serena was strong enough to be called a Hero. Even so, he could not promise her safety. She caught the seriousness in his face and stepped back without another word. Ketal left immediately and moved toward Magna Rain. The distance was not small, but distance no longer mattered to him. Minutes later, he reached his mark.

“So this is the place.”

He stood on a wide, empty plain.

***

“On the surface, it is just open ground,” Ketal said.

To any other eye, there would have been nothing unusual to see—just an ordinary stretch of land, indistinguishable from the rest. But beneath that quiet field lay Magna Rain.

“It truly is impressive,” he said.

If a city existed below him, the ground beneath his feet would be hollow. The state would be unstable, yet nothing on the surface gave it away. This was magic at the level of a Hero, the kind that altered the world instead of working within it.

“Beautiful,” he said with a small smile.

He expanded his senses, letting the world surge into his mind all at once. The flow of energy, sound, and breath painted a clear image before him. Beneath the plain stretched a vast hollow, an immense chamber carved out of the earth—and along its outer edge, an entrance yawned open.

Ketal began walking toward the entrance. According to Milayna, a gatekeeper and a guide would be waiting there; those who carried the proper token were allowed through, while those who didn’t were turned away as corpses. When Ketal had once crossed paths with the thief Cassandra, he had taken from her a dagger engraved with a skull, a mark of passage. With that token in his possession, even a vigilant gatekeeper should have posed no obstacle.

However, no one stood there.

He stopped in front of the entrance as if he had expected to find it empty. The gate would not open easily. Without the proper technique or the proper artifact, one could not crack it. It was more than a lock; it was a barrier set by a Hero mage. Brute force could not touch it, which was why the city needed a gatekeeper at all.

𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Ketal set his foot upon the marked spot. The stone screamed beneath him, and the wards shattered like brittle twigs. Hundreds of devices and spells broke in unison, their protections unraveling in a single breath. As the door tore free from its bindings, Ketal stepped through and entered the depths beyond.

“So this is Magna Rain,” he said.

The underground city where every criminal gathered—Ketal had long wondered about it from the moment he first heard its name. He had imagined what might exist within its depths, how its people survived, what kind of order sustained them, and what manner of lives they led beneath the earth.

There was supposed to be the Thieves’ Guild here. Through the ties he had made in the Barcan Estate, he had hoped to meet Cassan Hark again. He had wanted to see Cassandra as well. This place had been one of his curiosities.

Yet, that curiosity would not be satisfied. The underground city of Magna Rain had become a ruin. Everything had twisted and broken.